


How to Impress Your Boyfriend

by DragonNutt



Category: Xiaolin Showdown (Cartoon)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), M/M, aged up to budding teenagers, by which I mean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-12
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-10-03 07:20:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10238882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DragonNutt/pseuds/DragonNutt
Summary: Omi is on a mission: execute the most amazing, flawless, and extraordinary date possible.Shenanigans ensue.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NachoSammich](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NachoSammich/gifts).



On an otherwise quiet and dreary early morning, Omi barreled into the temple kitchen and slammed his hands on the table. “I need to know the absolute best locations for going on dates!”

For a moment, all three of his friends stared back at him blankly. Then Kimiko smirked into her breakfast, and Clay let out an “I’m-not-ready-for-this” sigh. The only person who still looked confused was Raimundo, who asked, “Is this a hypothetical thing or…?”

Omi had only a vague recollection of what “hypothetical” meant but wasn’t about to admit it. “It is most urgent! Jermaine has taken me to all the most marvelous places of New York City! He has shown me all these important museums and parks and buildings scraping skies and—and—” Rather pink in the face, he concluded, “And as grand as the temple is, it simply cannot compete with such wonders!”

Raimundo’s eyebrows were still furrowed, and Clay continued to stuff an egg sandwich into his mouth while pretending the conversation wasn’t happening, but Kimiko stifled a giggle. Giving a sympathetic smile, she said, “I don’t think Jermaine will care where you hang out as long as he’s with you, right?”

Waving a dismissive hand, Omi shook his head furiously. “That is not the point! I cannot just take Jermaine _anywhere_ — It has to be just as impressive as New York City! Temples, forests, mountains—those are common, so they will not do. Maybe an even _bigger_ city—”

Kimiko held up a palm. “Hold on, let me stop you there.” Turning her chair a bit so she could face the baffled little monk, she said, “Think about this from Jermaine’s perspective, huh? He grew up in a big city, so it’s old hat to him.” At the boy’s blank expression, she added, “That means he’s used to it.”

“Right!” Omi’s head bobbed in a swift nod.

Behind them, Raimundo whispered to Clay, “What are they talking about? What about Jermaine?” Clay shook his head and kept eating.

Kimiko continued, “All those forests and mountains—those are boring to _you_ because we’ve been all over the world and you’ve seen them before. But they wouldn’t be boring to Jermaine because he _hasn’t_ seen them before. Make sense?”

Omi pursed his lips. “So… you are saying that even if something does not impress me, it might still impress Jermaine?”

“Exactly.”

Grabbing the top of his beanie and tugging it over his ears, Omi grimaced. “But how will I know what impresses him if I cannot use my own judgment to—to— This is too confusing, Kimiko! I just want to take him somewhere amazing so that he thinks that _I_ am amazing— because _he_ is amazing and—”

“Okay, calm down, Romeo.” Kimiko reached out and patted the top of Omi’s head. The young monk had taken to wearing the blue beanie Jermaine had given him when they first met six years ago. (Even though Omi had grown in height a few inches since then, his head had not changed size at all.) At first, Kimiko had thought the wardrobe change had been out of sentiment, but she had lately grown to suspect that some unpleasant side effects of puberty had started to sprout on Omi’s forehead, and he was desperate to hide them. She wasn’t used to the boy showing signs of insecurity; it was unsettling, to say the least. “You know Jermaine better than we do, right? Use that big head of yours. Just think about the stuff he likes, what he thinks is cool, and I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”

Omi twiddled his thumbs. “R-right. Okay. I will… storm through my brain…” He bumped into a chair as he started a distracted walk back out the kitchen doorway.

Kimiko scraped her chair back to its proper place at the table, and Raimundo muttered, “Why does Omi want to impress Jermaine?”

Raising her eyes to stare across the table, her voice was deadpan. “Really, Rai?”

Raimundo’s shoulders stiffened. “What? You don’t have to impress your friends to make them like you; Omi should know that.”

“Wow, Rai.”

“What?” Raimundo glanced at Clay, looking for someone to defend him, but Clay was still stubbornly ignoring the conversation. “What am I missing here?”

“You mean besides the fact that ever since Omi started visiting Jermaine, he’s constantly talking about him? His ‘fascinating’ hair, his grades at school, his sense of humor, blah blah blah, the list goes on? You don’t catch any of that?”

Raimundo’s face paled a bit. “But Omi’s, like, eight years old!”

“He’s fourteen.”

Raimundo’s jaw dropped. “No, he’s not.”

She rolled her eyes. “We _just_ celebrated his birthday, Rai. You even made fun of the acne on his head and said ‘puberty hit him like a freight train.’ You’re a jerk, by the way.”

“I didn’t mean _this_ part of puberty!” Raimundo cried, looking absolutely horrified at the realization that Omi could age. “The little dude—he’s—married to his job, or something! He doesn’t get… feelings and urges and _eww_.”

Clay glanced up and finally spoke. “Denial. First stage o’ grief.”

Standing and tossing her plate to the sink, Kimiko strolled to the door. “Well, you two better get over that denial because I am _not_ gonna be the one to give Omi the birds and bees spiel.” At that realization, Clay’s and Rai’s faces turned even paler.


	2. Chapter 2

Drumming a pencil against his Trigonometry textbook, Jermaine found himself staring at the same math problem for a solid minute without taking in a single word. Though the streets outside echoed with the usual early evening clatter and his old desk light kept flickering, he couldn’t blame them for his inability to focus this time.

Deepening his frown, he tried reading the problem out loud, “If a ferris wheel with a radius of thirty meters makes one rotation every forty-five seconds…” Ferris wheels. Omi thought ferris wheels were boring. They’d gone to that festival in Central Park a couple months ago, and Omi had complained the ride was “even slower than Dojo.” They ended up having way more fun at the crossbow shooting booth, where the two had spent about an hour competing to see who could win more prizes to give the other. Jermaine now owned enough stuffed animal prizes to open up his own zoo—

Wait. Focus.

“Let H be the height of a passenger one meter above the ground,” he muttered, narrowing his eyes at the textbook, “and determine H as a function of time… Ugh.” Rubbing his eyes, he let his pencil clatter onto the tiny desk. His chair wobbled when he leaned over to grab his phone off the nightstand and scroll back through his last conversation.

_[Jermaine! I have two questions for you!]_

_[yeah sup?]_

He winced a bit at his response, feeling a little guilty for briefly forgetting Omi’s struggle to understand text lingo. He’d remembered right after hitting send, but as it turned out, a translation hadn’t been necessary.

_[Firstly, how did your chemistry test go?]_

_[pretty sure i killed it ;) ]_

_[I judge by your winky face, that is a good thing?]_

_[sure is!]_

_[ :D ]_

_[EXCELLENT!]_

Jermaine chuckled a bit. Though slang continued to baffle the Xiaolin Dragon, he’d figured out emojis rather quickly, even if he had to turn his hand-me-down phone sideways to decipher them.

_[Second question: are you busy this evening?]_

_[got some trig hmwk but thats it]_

_[*trigonometry homework]_

_[Then would it be alright if I visited?]_

A smile had lifted Jermaine’s features when he’d gotten the question in the middle of his U.S. History class. But then he’d remembered his empty wallet; he couldn’t exactly afford to take Omi sightseeing again until next week’s allowance. Not wanting to admit so, he’d tried dodging the subject before it could come up.

                _[sure dawg! want to watch a dvd?]_

_[pretty sure you havent seen emperors new groove yet]_

_[or we could watch lion king again]_

_[Actually, I was hoping I could take you somewhere!]_

Jermaine’s eyebrows had shot up at the request. Omi was a world-roaming Xiaolin Dragon; “somewhere” could be anywhere on earth. Jermaine had done his brief bit of travelling while training under Chase Young and then at the Xiaolin temple, but for the most part, New York City was the only place he knew.

                _[oh really?]_

_[where are we going?]_

                _[are we gonna battle some heylin punks?]_

_[It is a surprise!]_

_[…And no.]_

_[Kimiko says battling is not romantic.]_

_[dang. i was hoping to whoop some fire-breathing squirrel butts]_

Omi didn’t respond for five minutes, but just as Jermaine had started to worry that his boyfriend had missed the sarcasm:

_[The only butt you shall have to worry about is mine!]_

Jermaine’s U.S. History class had been briefly interrupted by his own surprised laugh. He’d hidden his phone before the teacher could spot it, but he hadn’t kept a straight face for the rest of class. Any of Omi’s fellow monks would have assumed the innuendo was completely unintentional, but Jermaine knew better. Omi was far smarter and sneakier than they thought.

                _[oh? am i whooping YOUR butt?]_

_[You will be doing nothing to my butt!]_

                _[aww_ _:( ]_

_[YOUR butt, on the other hand…]_

_[is there something you wanna do to my butt?]_

_[Yes.]_

_[WHOOP it.]_

                _[awww_ _:( ]_

At that point, Jermaine had to stifle his chuckles and stuff the phone in his backpack before the history teacher could confiscate it. He sent one last brief text between classes confirming that Omi could visit whenever he wanted, but by then he knew the monk would be asleep. Time zones had been the biggest challenge of both their friendship and their budding relationship; broad daylight for one was always the dead of night for the other. Even now, struggling to focus on his Trig homework, he knew it would be way too early in the morning for Omi to—

“JERMAINE!”

The sound of the Golden Tiger Claws ripping through space was Jermaine’s only warning before a blur collided into him like an elated labrador. The chair tipped over, and Jermaine snatched the edge of his desk to keep from hitting the floor.

“Omi? Wha--?” Jermaine grabbed at the arms around his neck, hoisted himself upright again, and stole a glance at his clock. “Doll, what are you doing up? It’s gotta be five in the morning at your place—”

“Four, actually!” Omi scrabbled around until he was sitting in Jermaine’s lap, beaming. “I woke up and was too excited to wait! Is your homework done?”

“Uh.” Jermaine stole a glance at the abandoned textbook practically gathering dust at his desk. “Sure.”

Omi’s smile dropped immediately into a scowl. “Do I look like I was born tomorrow?”

“Yesterday, and uh, it’s done. Or. It’s _gonna_ be done.” At Omi’s unconvinced and unblinking stare, Jermaine tried a different approach. “It’s trig, man. I got an A in that class.” Scooping his surprisingly lightweight boyfriend off his lap, he took a few sidesteps toward the bed, where they had spent a few late Sunday nights cramming for midterms. “Remember? You told me something about how ‘the best way to learn is to teach’ or something, and you had me try to show you the difference between sine and cosine.”

Omi’s face paled a bit, a faint echo of the overwhelmed expression he had worn during their last study session. “Ah, yes. And the um, hippo—hip—hypotenuse!” He made a feeble line motion with his hands. “The long side of a triangle, the one that, um…” His wrists came together so his hands could form a right angle.

“Exactly.” Jermaine felt a tad guilty that his math lessons hadn’t been efficient enough to stick much better than that, but hopefully Omi didn’t need to know trigonometry terms to win Shen Gong Wu anyway. He reached back behind him, searching for the simple little flower he’d plucked at Central Park and left on the bookshelf. “So even if I totally bailed on my homework—which I won’t, I got a free period after gym— I’m not worried about it.” Snatching the flower, he brought it up to Omi’s face. “Besides, I’ve got a date tonight.”

Omi’s face turned a bit pink when he took the flower, but then he gave Jermaine a cheeky smile. “No pick-up phrase this time?”

Jermaine frowned and squinted at the other teen’s face. “Hey man, are you okay? Your eyes are looking kinda whack.”

“My eyes?” Alarmed and confused, Omi stammered, “I— No, I’m— Why do you ask?”

“There’s something in your eyes, doll.” Jermaine cupped the other’s face, leaned in, and stared intently for a moment. “Wait, no. Those are just sparkles.”

And _there_ was the blush he wanted. Trying in vain to hide his flustered smile, Omi flicked Jermaine on the nose. “Oho, I see! Very smooth.” Clambering out of Jermaine’s arms and flopping backwards onto the bed, he rolled backwards until he could sit upright. “Well, if you _insist_ on behaving so irresponsibly that you would neglect your school duties, are you otherwise ready to depart?”

“Uh.” Jermaine looked down at his loose pants and jacket. “You tell me, doll. What kind of weather are we talking? Anything I need to wear?”

“Your clothing is fine, Jermaine—you look as wondrously handsome as always!” Omi jumped from the bed and slashed the Golden Tiger Claws through the air. As the portal opened, sending a chilly draft through the room, Omi grabbed Jermaine’s hand and said, “Shall we?” Still beaming sheepishly at his boyfriend’s simple but sincere compliment, Jermaine followed him through the portal into the unknown.


	3. Chapter 3

Despite Kimiko’s insistence that he needed to “learn how to wing it,” Omi considered it most fortunate that he had planned this date so intently. Painstakingly researching various locations—their time zones, their weather, their attractions—had not only involved a few hours of perusing the internet on Kimiko’s computer (after the temple library had proven surprisingly useless), but had also required some brief world travelling just to ensure the date went as impressively as possible.

Still, when he and Jermaine landed on the crunchy forest floor, he discovered instantly that he had miscalculated their landing by about ten meters. The midnight sky was supposed to be clear above them, but they had landed directly under a tree and couldn’t see it. Unacceptable.

The purple portal closed behind them, and Jermaine squinted his eyes to look around. “Oh. Kinda dark out here, huh?” Squeezing Omi’s hand, he smiled. “Where are we?”

Furrowing his thin eyebrows at the Golden Tiger Claws, Omi muttered absently, “Galloway Forest Park. It is in Scotland.” Glancing around, he pointed toward the edge of the woods. “My apologies, Jermaine. I meant for us to land over there.”

He tugged at his boyfriend’s hand and led him toward the clearing, internally chastising himself while Jermaine said, “Hey man, no worries, I mean… you just sent us across an entire ocean, doll. I don’t think a few feet matter… much…”

When they stepped out into the clearing, Jermaine’s words trailed off, and his mouth dropped open. Omi intently watched his reaction, a tad nervous thanks to his prior miscalculation. Releasing his hand, Jermaine took a few tentative steps forward, staring up at the sky. Pointing upwards, he glanced back. “Doll. _Doll._ That—that’s not real, is it?”

 “What’s not real?”

“The _sky_ , man! You didn’t use any Wu to make it look like that, did you?”

Omi flushed a bit. “Well, uh, I did use the Lunar Locket to move the moon a little bit that direction—” He gestured vaguely to the south. “But it should not affect the tides or weather too drastically. I mostly wanted the stars to be more visible for you. This park has a good night view because the um… the um… the light does not pollute it? And you were so excited while you were learning astronomy for your science classes last semester, and I know it’s hard to see stars in New York City, so I thought…”

“Omi, _doll_ … I mean I’ve seen stars before, but…” Jermaine spun around, gawking at the sky and nearly tripping over his own legs. Omi felt a smile creeping up his face; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the other teen so awestruck. Hundreds of thousands of stars filled the sky, shimmering through hazy shades of dark blue and purple. It seemed perfectly ordinary from Omi’s perspective, but Jermaine’s excitement was practically contagious. Omi bounced on the soles of his feet, beaming while the taller teen stumbled back in his direction, eyes still skyward.

Jermaine grabbed his hand again and point up at the stars. “Look! That’s Ursa Major, obviously, but over there is— Is that the Andromeda Galaxy? Wait, no, I remember I got that quiz question wrong— But I’m betting the one over there is Canis Major, and that one might be Gemini—It’s so hard to tell, man, there are _so many stars_!” With his free hand flailing, he gushed, “Look at how _blue_ everything is! All those streaks of _colors_ and— I always thought that was just a photo effect—” He grinned back down at Omi, who hadn’t taken his eyes off him. Deflating a bit, he said, “S-sorry, guess I’m buggin’ a bit. Don’t you think it’s cool?”

“Huh?” Omi blinked and gave another passing glance toward the sky. “Ah, yes, it is very nice! That’s why I chose this location. I just like watching you more.”

A flustered sound escaped his boyfriend, but then the smile returned and he went back to sky gazing. The two sat on the forest floor, and the next few minutes passed quietly, occasionally interrupted by Jermaine pointing out another constellation or planet he recognized. All the while, Omi thought about how warm his boyfriend’s hand was and hoped that his own wasn’t too sweaty.

After a little while, Jermaine cleared his throat and scooted a little closer to Omi’s side. “So, uh… kinda cold out here, huh?”

The content smile immediately dropped from Omi’s face. “Is it?” Yanking his hand away while he clambered to his feet, he said, “I am terribly sorry, Jermaine! I am not as sensitive to the cold as the other monks— It did not occur to me that you would be uncomfortable!”

Hand awkwardly outstretched to where Omi had been sitting seconds ago, Jermaine said, “N-no, I meant, uh—”

Securing the Golden Tiger Claws to his wrist again, Omi babbled, “Not to worry, Jermaine! I had another location planned in case this spot proved inadequate. The sun has not set there yet, but the water will be quite warm— You do not have any electronics with you, correct?”

“I, uh…” Startled by the question, Jermaine reached to his pocket and found it empty. “Actually, no. I think I left my phone on my desk…”

“Excellent!” Slicing the Golden Tiger Claws through the air and causing both of them to wince at the sudden light, Omi pulled the Gills of Hamachi out of his robes and attached them to his neck. He turned and reached back to Jermaine. “Take my hand and hold your breath.”

Looking a little astonished, Jermaine grabbed Omi’s hand but narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Why?”

“It is a surprise!” Omi took a deep breath. “Gills of Hamachi!”

As a layer of green scales morphed across his and Jermaine’s skin, Omi yanked him toward the portal. Perhaps startled by the sudden transformation, Jermaine let go of his hand, and the two were briefly separated.

When Omi fell out of the other side of the portal, he had a fleeting second to catch the sight of a stunning sunset over the southern Pacific Ocean before he landed feet-first in the water. Relieved that the temperature was indeed far more pleasant than their last location, he took a deep breath through his newly formed gills. Though he knew Jermaine had easy enough access to his own ocean in New York City, he hoped that the other teen would still appreciate the tropical environment. Perhaps they could visit the nearby beach. Maybe they would even see a dolphin, or a whale, or—

His tiger instincts flared. He spun around in time to see an enormous fin pass by his face— _Dorsal fin? Caudal fin? Clay had named a few terms when they watched that Jaws movie_ —

An odd, mangled phrase crossed his mind, something about a frying pan and a fire. Meanwhile, the creature made a lazy circle around him, beady eyes watching him with mild interest. Omi gulped and raised his fists, but instead of initiating any sort of attack, the shark seemed to grow bored and slowly began to swim away.

Of course, that’s when Jermaine landed right on top of it.

In a booming splash and a flurry of bubbles, the shark thrashed and tossed Jermaine aside like an empty soda can. While Jermaine kicked and yelped in confusion, Omi rushed forward and grabbed onto him. Pulling the taller teen upright, Omi yanked another Shen Gong Wu out of his robes. “Tongue of Saiping!”

Jermaine grabbed onto Omi’s robes to steady himself. “What the--? What’d I hit?” His eyes traveled up to the dots glowing on the other’s head. Then he blinked, whipped his head around, and spotted the shark’s silhouette just as it whirled around and rushed straight toward them. The fins on Jermaine’s head pinned down in terror. “OMI—OMI, LOOK OUT—”

Omi pulled Jermaine behind him. “Prepare for defeat, foul creature!” The light from his forehead lit the water, and just as the shark’s features cleared and it opened its jaws, he punched it in the nose.

“Ow!” the shark squealed. The Tongue of Saiping glimmered in Omi’s other hand while the beast shifted course and dove straight down, whining back up at them, “What was that for?”

“You…” Omi blinked a few times before he pressed the Tongue of Saiping up to his mouth and indignantly shouted back, “You attacked us!”

“Because you hit me!” The shark had the nerve to sound offended of all things while it circled under their feet. Watching the predator, Jermaine’s eyes were exactly as round and nearly as large as Omi’s head. Clinging to the shorter teen’s clothing so tightly that he nearly ripped a seam, he curled his legs under him as if to keep them out of the shark’s reach.

“Jermaine did not mean to land on you!” Omi paddled his free hand while he pivoted in the water, keeping himself between the shark and his overwhelmed boyfriend. “He likes animals very much, even _rude_ ones like you! Now go away before I teach you a humiliating defeat!”

Slowly inching its way back upward, the shark’s silhouette slid in and out of focus. “Why should I leave? I was here first. I _live_ here.”

“Because you tried to eat us!”

“Did not!” The shark drew close enough that Omi could peer into its eyes again. As it swam past their faces, Omi felt one of Jermaine’s hands release its death grip on his shirt. Just as the tail fin passed by, Jermaine reached out and touched it. The shark did not seem to notice.

“We will not stay long,” Omi said, still scowling while he watched the shark’s outline fade into the darkening water. “You mind your own business, and we shall mind ours!”

“Hmmph,” was the shark’s final reply before it vanished entirely.

Omi’s dots faded, and as the ocean turned dark, he realized in all the kerfuffle, he and Jermaine had completely missed the sunset. An aggravated sigh escaped him, and he and Jermaine paddled their way up to the water’s surface. When they reached the air, Omi yanked off the Gills of Hamachi and muttered, “I am sorry, Jermaine. It seems that our date has ended in disaster…”

Jermaine gawked at him, breathing hard like he’d only just remembered how. “Doll… dawg, you punched a shark.”

“Ah, yes.” Omi gave a dismissive shrug. “I shall have to let Clay know how terribly impolite it was. He told me that sharks don’t attack people. He was trying to make me feel better after I saw a scary movie, but then Raimundo showed me its terrible sequels and that helped a lot…”

“Omi, you just _punched a shark_.”

Omi’s eyebrows lifted. Jermaine was staring at him the way he’d stared at the stars earlier, completely captivated. He reached out and cupped Omi’s cheeks. “Y-you just… That thing went all postal with all those teeth and you just lay into it like it was a lame high school bully…”

Finally catching onto the realization that Jermaine was _not_ utterly disappointed by Omi’s absolute failure to execute the perfect date, Omi’s frown lifted into a shy smile. “Well, of course. I am a very strong warrior, you know.”

Jermaine let out a soft laugh, and his expression turned a little dazed. “Y-yeah…”

Omi looked around. Though the western sky still held a few shades of fading oranges and pinks, the water was turning dark under the early evening sky. “I am sorry that we missed the sunset, th—”

Omi’s words cut off when Jermaine pulled him forward and planted a brief kiss on his lips. Despite possessing what he considered lightning fast reflexes, Omi was too surprised to respond. Jermaine pulled away, smiling quietly. “It’s cool, doll, I like watching you more.”


End file.
